


Dreams of Time, Time of Dreams

by DelphiPsmith



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Dreams, F/M, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Hogwarts, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 12:38:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17447165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DelphiPsmith/pseuds/DelphiPsmith
Summary: They see each other, but through a glass darkly; will they ever see one another face to face?





	Dreams of Time, Time of Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired in part by ELO’s “[Hold on Tight to Your Dreams](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt_Se7BtSQg)” which has always been one of my favorite songs.
> 
> Written for the 2018 [sshg_giftfest](http://sshg_giftfest.livejournal.com) on LiveJournal.

_Love is time and space  
measured with the heart.  
\-- Marcel Proust_

Time, some say, is an arrow. It does not turn and turn about; there is no reversing what has been done, no unsaying the harsh word or undoing the hurtful deed. We move inexorably from past to future, always and only forward. Others argue that time is cyclic, that the wheel turns, that we come and go and will come again. Still others claim that it is simply a stage where events take place; all of time and space is there, existing and existing and existing: you are reading this, have always been reading it, will always be reading it.

A few – a lucky few – know that time, whatever it may be, vanishes utterly in the presence of love.

***

[1986] She dreams of him for the first time when she’s six: a skinny boy a little older than herself, all arms and legs, with dark hair that falls over his face and eyes like pools of ink. Complex emotions are beyond her at six, but she’s a happy little girl and so she hopes he’s happy too. There’s nothing to tell her that the dream is important, not yet; it’s just one among many others that flit through her sleeping brain. But she likes him, she thinks, as she turns over and sinks back into slumber. He seems like someone she could be friends with.

***

[1981] He dreams of her for the first time shortly after Lily’s death: a young woman, perhaps twenty years old, slender, with thick brown hair and eyes the dark-honey color of good whisky with firelight shining through it. He cannot see her face clearly – some sort of mist or veil obscures it – but he senses her warmth, her tenderness; despite the tearing pain in his heart, her quiet grace and tranquil presence bestow on him a measure of peace; his grief and guilt release their iron grip, and he sleeps more easily than he thought he ever would again.

***

[1988-1991] She dreams of him again, and again, and again over the years. He grows with her, always slightly older, just as he was in the beginning. She sees him riding on his father’s shoulders and laughing, eating lunch with his mother at a battered and scarred breakfast table, playing with a little red-haired girl. There is more of his mother and less of his father as the years go by. Later, she watches him do magic tricks and applauds when he levitates a feather, or turns two twigs into a pair of swords so they can practice fencing. His shy smile is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. She doesn’t remember the dreams when she wakes, but his face settles into the deepest part of her, like a key into a lock.

***

[1994-1995] He dreams of her more often as the storm clouds begin to gather, as the Ministry closes its eyes to the rise of the Death Eaters and the return of the Dark Lord. The night after the Dark Mark blazes in the sky above the Quidditch World Cup, the night Karkaroff confronts him and hisses veiled threats even while shaking with fear, the night Cedric Diggory is murdered. She seems to know when he needs her, although even as he ponders this he knows how ridiculous it is; she is, after all, nothing but a conjuring of his own mind. And yet there is a texture to the dreams, a richness, a _there_ ness to them that makes him wonder. He considers consulting one of the other professors, then discounts it immediately; the most logical person would be Trelawney and he doesn’t want to submit the benign spirit of his dreams to her clumsy poking and prodding. 

***

[1996] In Potions Class, finished early with the assignment, she sketches idly on a scrap of parchment a picture that comes into her head: a boy of fifteen or sixteen, a lock of dark hair falling over his face, wary eyes that seem to follow her as she moves her head from side to side. She looks at it, wondering who this boy is and why he seems so familiar. His eyes are dark: nothing at all like Ron’s blue ones, perhaps a bit like Viktor’s, but they speak to her in a way that no one else’s ever have. A tingle of anticipation rises through her; is this someone she’s seen somewhere? Someone real? Later, Severus finds the scrap on the floor; for a moment he thinks the child looks familiar, then shrugs, crumples the parchment, throws it into the fire.

***

[1997] He conjures his patronus, watches with Albus as the silvery doe gambols about the room. “Always,” he says, and in that moment he realizes that it’s not a lie – he will always love Lily, she was the bright star of his childhood – but that she has become, at last, his past. The shadowy woman of his dreams who comforts him in his darkest hours, who whispers “This too shall pass,” she is his present. And, perhaps, his future? Though he has yet to see her face – it remains misty, like an image in a fogged mirror, apart from the eyes – he wonders for the first time if maybe, just maybe, she might be real. From that night on, he will fight for her, and for himself, as much as for the others who depend on him.

***

[1997] She wakes in the night, her heart pounding. There was a boy... wasn’t there? No, not a boy. A young man, with dark hair and eyes like midnight, whose touch made her breath come fast and her skin catch fire. But the dream begins to slip away even as she tries to cling to it, and she’s left only with a sense of watchfulness, as if a great change was coming, a great mystery hovering just out of her reach. She punches her pillow, turns it over in search of a cool spot, and closes her eyes, hoping that if she falls asleep soon enough, he’ll be there waiting for her.

***

[1997-1998] As his outer life grows darker and the walls begin to close in on him, he finds that he yearns for sleep the way a starving man years for bread. The night after he gives Narcissa his Unbreakable Vow to protect her son, knowing full well what it will likely mean for him, she is there, whispering words of love and courage. And when at last he fulfills his pledge, when he utters the Unforgivable Curse and watches Albus Dumbledore’s body spiral out into the darkness, he holds fast to the thought that she will be with him that night to remind him that all the guilt need not be his alone. And oh, the night of Charity Burbage’s death – that night she holds him while he weeps as he never wept for Albus, weeps for what he has become and what he yet must do. When he raises his head, he sees that there are tears in her eyes for him.

***

[1997-1998] She trusts him, without being able to articulate why. Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond any rational explanation, she trusts him. Even when he does the most terrible thing of all, and Albus Dumbledore lies dead at the foot of the Astronomy Tower, her heart tells her that they have missed something, that the puzzle is incomplete. Ron and Harry think she’s mad, so she stops talking about it and simply holds the knowledge close to her. She _knows_ he is not what he seems, knows it in her bones, the way she knows her own face when she looks in the mirror.

***

[1998] “Look at me,” Severus whispers, lying there in a pool of his own blood (a pool which, he notes absently, is growing larger at a terrifying rate). An icy chill is creeping up his limbs, eating its way towards his heart with an implacable hunger. The boy looks at him, and his eyes are no longer his mother’s eyes, no longer Lily’s, only Harry’s, and Severus realizes finally that this boy is most of the way to being a man, eyes sunken and exhausted, a stubble of beard on cheeks and chin. His eyes slip past Harry, to the girl kneeling behind him. Her face is pale and drawn, and here too he sees the woman rapidly overtaking the girl. There are tears in her eyes for him, and as darkness gathers at the edge of his vision it is the tears that pull away the veil and he recognizes her at last. “You,” he husks, trying to put everything he feels for her, everything she has meant to him, into that single word, and then the darkness takes him.

***

[1998] After it’s all over, after the burials and the mourning, she asks Harry for Severus Snape’s memories. The man himself lies in a coma in St Mungo’s, hovering between life and death; although the Wizarding World is almost pathetically eager to make amends for their treatment of him, the Healers hold out little hope. She doesn’t know why she needs to see his memories – Harry has told them everything that was in them, his voice breaking at times – but instinct that runs deeper than knowledge, deeper even than conscious thought whispers to her that she needs to see for herself. He’s reluctant, feeling a belated loyalty to the man who risked his life for them, who was strong enough to bear the reputation of traitor, murderer, and Death Eater for a cause he believed in, but she persuades him. Standing before the Pensieve she takes a deep breath and plunges in... and when she sees the boy Severus, she knows. She jerks out of the Pensieve with a gasp and Apparates to St Mungo’s without a second’s hesitation, hope and fear filling her in equal measure.

***

[1998] Groggy, disoriented, Severus tries to swallow. It hurts. He raises a shaking hand to his throat and feels thick bandages. There is a soft bed beneath him, the sound of birdsong outside his window, the good heat of sunlight on his face. Warm hands, the fingers gentle but strong, wrap his own. His eyes open slowly, and he sees a young woman with thick brown hair and eyes the dark-honey color of good whisky with firelight shining through it.

“You,” he whispers hoarsely, his heart lifting in a joy he never thought to feel.

“You,” she answers with a slow smile, and bends forward to kiss him.


End file.
